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Updated: May 11, 2025
Even that diversion, however, did not prevent us from talking of nothing else but the strange noises, and I think, as we waited, we all got into the frame of mind which would have manufactured them even if there had been none. We were sitting about the room when suddenly the most weird and uncanny rappings began. Rusty was on his feet in a moment, barking like mad. We looked from one to another.
The town took no part in the witchcraft horror, and got none of its old women and town charges hanged for witches, "Goody" Morse had the spirit rappings in her house two hundred years earlier than the Fox girls did, and somewhat later a Newbury minister, in wig and knee-buckles, rode, Bible in hand, over to Hampton to lay a ghost who had materialized himself and was stamping up and down stairs in his military boots.
It was very troublesome to them, until they broke it into small pieces and threw it out into the roadway. So for some weeks the haunting continued, with rappings, scratching, movements of heavy articles, and many other strange things, as are attested by all who were in the village, until at last they ceased as suddenly as they had begun.
She was a girl of fourteen, of a timid and nervous organization, who had suffered great annoyance by the persistence of the rappings about her wherever she might be; at first in her bedroom, but finally to her great dismay in the class-rooms of the primary public school of New York, in which she held the position of assistant teacher and where she conducted the recitations.
The facts were facts: people really died or were sterile, flocks suffered, ships were wrecked, fields were ruined; the mistake lay in attributing these things to witchcraft. On the other hand, the facts of rappings, ghosts, clairvoyance, in spite of the universally consentient evidence, are very doubtful facts after all. Their existence has to be established before we look about for their cause.
"We drop you! We'll have a New Woman's Club in Orchardina with some warmth in its heart and some brains in its head even if it hasn't as much money in its pocket!" Amid stern rappings, hissings, cries of "Order order," and frantic "Motions to adjourn" the meeting broke up; the club elements dissolving and reforming into two bodies as by some swift chemical reaction.
Sundays she was invariably importuned to dine with the family, and of occasional evenings, Alma Neugass, angular and full of the knobs of protruding neckbones, elbows, and shoulder blades, and with little sacs under her eyes as if she had wept down into them that life could be so tasteless, would knock at her door, and for an hour or two, and sometimes up to midnight, sit on the edge of Lilly's bed, the drone of their conversation surviving repeated rappings from the parental bedroom, adjoining.
After having been for some time troubled by the rappings she began to feel involuntary motions in her right hand which increased to constantly recurring violent exercise of the muscles, when it occurred to her from the character of the motions that the hand wanted a pencil to write and she laid paper and a pencil on the table.
"At ten sharp, then, to-morrow I shall be there," said Craig. "It is now eight-thirty. Do you think I can see Vandam to-night? What time do these rappings occur?" "Why, yes, you surely will be able to see him to-night. He hasn't stirred from the house since his wife died. He told me he momentarily expected messages from her direct when she had got strong enough in her new world.
The Tiltons built a cradle for her which is one of the traditions of this unhappy period of her life. She tried mesmerism and clairvoyance and heard rappings at night. She married again, this time a Dr. Daniel Patterson, a travelling dentist. He never made a success of anything. They were miserably poor and his marriage was no more successful than most of his other enterprises.
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